Forbidden Heart (The Hearts of Sawyers Bend #9)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

PAIGE

ONE YEAR AGO

Istared into the cold dregs of my coffee and let out a sigh.

I wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep for a million years.

Slouching back in my chair, I tried a deep breath, hoping some oxygen in my brain would wake me up.

I hadn’t slept well in months. At night, I’d lain in my childhood bedroom listening to the rattle of my mother’s breaths as she struggled for air, dying a little more every day.

Now, the silence was oppressive, every creak of the house as loud as a gunshot.

I was alone. I’d thought it was all I wanted.

I hated this house. The walls were a sick mustard shade, stained by years of cigarette smoke. The linoleum in the kitchen was faded and worn through in spots. My mother had refused to update any of it. Decorations were a waste of money, she’d insisted, and waste was sinful.

I’d escaped this house as soon as I could figure out how, leaving at eighteen for college, paying my way by working as a nanny, a job I’d found out of pure luck.

I’d arrived on campus knowing my scholarships would only go so far, and I needed to find a job fast. Then a professor had a friend who had lost their nanny last minute.

They were desperate. I was desperate. I didn’t have a ton of experience with kids, but neither of us was in a position to quibble.

I took the position, and within six months I’d moved out of the dorms and into their home, changing my major to early childhood education.

Who knew I’d love taking care of someone else’s kids?

I didn’t want my own—not anytime soon—but for the first time in my life I’d seen what a family was supposed to be like.

For so many years it had just been my mother and me, after my father had walked out on us.

Nothing about growing up with Harriet McKenna brought to mind the concept of family.

Constant criticism and a liberal smack of her palm on my cheek when she was displeased had left me feeling like the only point of family was to escape them.

But at eighteen, a freshman in college warmly enfolded into the Bellingham family, I saw what it could be.

A husband and wife who loved each other, who made time even though they both had busy careers.

Who doted on their children despite their packed schedules.

The kids were easy to love. Abby, an infant, fussy at nap time and not a fan of the bottle, but otherwise the cutest thing I’d ever seen.

And Joshua—a spirited two-year-old. We did well enough once he learned he couldn’t charm me, though deep inside I had to fight not to give in when he flashed those dimples.

I stayed with the Bellinghams through college and two years of grad school, intending to leave and find a teaching job from there. The kids were old enough to go to school, and I needed to make a decision. I had the degrees. I’d acquired some in-class experience. What did I want?

I’d been headed to the classroom when a friend of the Bellinghams made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: follow their family as they traveled, minding two young children.

It was a chance to see Europe on someone else’s dime.

I’d met the Smiths in the course of my years with the Bellinghams—they were kind and fun, their kids boisterous but good-hearted.

I said yes, packed my bags, and off we went.

Another four years passed that way. I could have gone on like that forever.

Halfway through my twenty-ninth year, I got the call.

My mother—who I’d barely spoken to in almost a decade—was sick, dying, and alone.

Reluctantly, I went home, though “home” hardly seemed the word to describe this place.

I looked around again and sighed. What a waste.

What a sad house she’d lived in—we’d lived in.

Now that I’d seen the world and knew how things could be, the stark contrast was all the more apparent.

I’d gone back and forth, organizing things here for my mother, trying to ease her suffering without becoming her servant—which, I realized, was exactly what she’d wanted.

Me at her beck and call, cut off from the rest of the world.

Catering to her every whim. This was the life she’d envisioned for me, and she’d only needed to contract a fatal illness to get it.

I took care of her, but I wouldn’t lie and say I liked it.

Every moment under her roof was one too many.

I always felt like a faker when I flew back to the Smiths and was welcomed into their family again, caring for the kids, laughing with Janice at the end of a long day.

They thought I was torn, that what I really wanted was to be with my dying mother. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

I never told them how bad things were at home. It was embarrassing to admit that my own mother didn’t love me. Duty was the only thing between us. Harriet McKenna had raised me to understand that I owed her for my very existence, and she expected compensation for her sacrifice.

Intellectually, I got it. It wasn’t me, or rather, it wasn’t anything I’d done.

I had the bad luck to look exactly like my father, right down to my oddly light blue eyes.

I’d never met the man. He’d run off with another woman while my mother had been pregnant with me.

And when I’d been born with his eyes, his dark curls, and his olive skin, she’d hated me.

I think if I’d been a little replica of Harriet—willowy with cornflower-blue eyes and wispy blonde hair—maybe then she would have loved me.

I could have been a little mini-me for her to mold.

Instead, as she told me over and over, I was a replica of him, sent to remind her of her failure as a wife and a woman.

I was the visual representation of everything she’d lost, and she’d never forgiven me for it.

She had a heavy hand and high expectations.

Some of them I’d lived up to. I’d been a good student, kept my room clean, knew how to speak respectfully.

The flat of her hand taught me to keep my tongue under control.

I didn’t know if my father ran off because Harriet didn’t have love in her, or if he’d taken her heart with him when he disappeared.

Either way, there’d been none left for me.

The first few years my mother was sick, I helped without living under her roof for more than a week at a time.

I arranged rides to and from chemo and coordinated with kind ladies from her church who brought over food a few times a week.

My mother knew I didn’t want any of this.

So, of course, my presence was what she demanded.

Eventually, she reached a point where I was the only one who could care for her.

I left the Smiths, my heart breaking as I packed my bags, my tears matching those of the children.

My nanny families had been the only true family I’d ever known, and going home to take care of Harriet felt like a cell door clanging shut, locking me away from warm embraces and steaming cocoa, sealing me into this shadowed house that reeked of stale smoke.

I was left wondering if time had stood still in these walls; the clock stopped in the early eighties, the avocado countertops cracked, and a phone bolted to the wall in the kitchen, the long curly cord trailing on the floor.

Time didn’t exist in this house. For a woman who seemed to hate everything about life, my mother held on to it with a steely grip, fading slowly, day by day, dragging it out.

If she’d been another kind of parent, I would have been grateful for every day we had together.

But she was Harriet McKenna, and though I’d never say it out loud, in my heart I wished she’d hurry the fuck up and set me free.

And now she was gone. The house was empty, and I answered to no one. If you’d asked me before she died, I would have told you that freedom was all I wanted. Now that it was here, I didn’t feel free—I felt hollowed out and empty. Alone.

She’d left me everything. Not that “everything” was much: this house, her car, a small retirement account.

I’d buried her quietly in the plot she’d purchased, foregoing a wake, letting the ladies from her church set up a quiet service.

I had stacks of frozen casseroles in the freezer and empty boxes everywhere.

All I had to do was pack up the house, put it on the market, and take a step into the future.

I picked up the cold coffee cup and tilted it. Still empty, and it was too late in the day for more coffee. What I wanted was an ice-cold soda. Soda had been forbidden in this house, along with any other sweets.

Sugar lets the devil in. I didn’t know who told her that, but she’d said it often enough.

When she got too sick to come downstairs, I stocked the fridge with whatever I wanted, including ice-cold cans of ginger ale and my favorite, orange soda.

I pushed back from the table, the chair legs scraping the worn linoleum, swung open the door of the ancient refrigerator, and grabbed a can.

The sugar went straight to my brain, tasting vaguely of oranges and exactly like heaven.

I needed to make a list, a plan. When she first got sick, I was twenty-nine, still in the figuring-it-all-out phase of life, feeling like I had an eternity stretching before me to settle on what I wanted.

A career? My own family? Taking care of other people’s children had allowed me to see the world with people I loved, while saving almost all of my salary.